Hugh Tracey treble kalimba

Hugh Tracey, an English ethnomusicologist who moved to Africa in 1920, spent several years
from the 1920s through the 1950s traveling about in rural Africa (i.e., as far away as he could get
from western musical influences such as radio, eastern-influenced bands, and Christian
missionaries) where he recorded traditional music and documented the tunings and note layouts
of the different kalimbas. Tracey later founded the company African Musical Instruments and
started building a mbira variant in Roodepoort, South Africa, which he called the kalimba; he
began exporting them around the world in 1954. The name kalimba is a Bantu word which means
"little music", and is similar to the word karimba, a type of mbira.[citation needed] The note layout and
tuning were not traditional; rather, the kalimbas were tuned diatonically in the key of G, with
adjacent notes on the scale sitting on opposite sides of the kalimba. These were the first mbira to
be commercially exported from Africa. In the early 1960s, Tracey secured an initial order of
10,000 kalimbas with Creative Playthings of Princeton, New Jersey, a company which designed
and distributed toys and furniture.[citation needed]
The Hugh Tracey kalimbas are tuned diatonically in the key of G. The arrangement of the notes
on the Hugh Tracey kalimba borrows from the typical scheme with the lowest notes in the center
and the upper notes on the left and the right, but a regular note layout is used, with the notes in
the ascending scale alternating strictly right-left and going outwards towards the two sides. With
this bidirectional note layout, it seems that all intuition from linearly mapped instruments goes
out the window. This arrangement requires that the kalimba player develop a new intuition, but
that new intuition is not as hard to come by as the more idiosyncratic note layouts of the
traditional African lamellophones.
The diatonic western kalimba tuning which Tracey used was practical for a worldwide
instrument - with hundreds of African kalimba tunings, the chosen Western standard would
maximize the number of people who would immediately connect with the kalimba. The beauty
of this note arrangement, with notes going up the scale in a right-left-right-left progression, is
that modal 1-3-5 or 1-3-5-7 chords are made by playing adjacent tines and are trivial to learn and
play. If chords are played in the lower octave, the same notes will appear on the opposite side of
the kalimba in the upper octave, which makes it very easy to simultaneously play a melody in the
upper octave and an accompanying harmony in the lower octave. So, the arrangement of notes
on the Hugh Tracey kalimba (and on virtually any kalimba, as this note layout scheme has been
adopted by virtually everyone who copies the instrument) makes some complex musical
operations very simple.

Alternative tunings are possible, as the tines of most kalimbas are easily pushed in and out to
sharpen or flatten their pitch. Some alternative tunings simply change the key of the kalimba,
without changing the note layout scheme. Other alternative tunings move the kalimba to nonmodal scales (such as Middle-Eastern scales). Each note of the kalimba can be tuned
independently (unlike a guitar), so any scale, western or non-western, is possible, and traditional
African scales are still accessible to this modern African instrument. Composer Georg Hajdu has
tuned the Hugh Tracey alto kalimba to the chromatic steps of the BohlenPierce scale in a piece
called Just Her - Jester - Gesture. The BohlenPierce scale subdivides the just twelfth into 13
steps.
The Chromatic Kalimba is also a fairly new instrument. There are a few different makers of the
chromatic kalimba. One is the Hugh Tracey/AMI 2-octave kalimba which ranges from the G
below middle C up to the G above the top line of the treble clef. The accidentals are mounted on
the rear side of the kalimba as flats right under their adjacent parent note from the top. Recently,
(2010) Aaron Chavez modelled an idea for the 4-octave chromatic kalimba utilizing octaves C2C6; JBH Guitars is its original manufacturer. While kalimba initially meant the Hugh Tracey
product, the name is now generic. Shortly after the Hugh Tracey kalimba started being sold
around the world, artisans and craftspeople started copying or adapting the design. Several high
quality kalimba makers exist around the world today: Lucinda Ellison, Andrew Masters, David
Bellinger, Steve Catania, Luc DeCock, R. P. Collier, and Greg Trimble. Most kalimbas sold
today are inexpensive copies made in third-world countries such as Pakistan or Indonesia